ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a challenge that has undermined the potential of a revolutionary project. Unlike the other challenges, the questions of organization and coalition-building, the challenge of overcoming the tension between economic and political activism is not simply the outcome of failing strategies and tactics characteristic of new social movements. The split has its lineage in the Mubarak era, when workers, farmers and other groups of protesting citizens were portrayed by most of the rest of society, including the pro-democracy movement, as being engaged in narrowly focused struggles for economic demands such as salary increases and access to social provisions. In Rosa Luxemburg's analysis, the economic struggle can at moments be the factor that advances events from one political focal point to another. In Egypt, the 'political' and 'economic' struggles, with their ebbs and flows, evolved and organized alongside each other without impeding or overwhelming the other.
